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Gallery Hours

Weekly gallery opening hours are Tuesday-Friday, 11AM-4PM during the Spring and Fall semesters. The galleries remain closed to the public during Winter and Summer breaks. During these times, The Magnes is open to researchers on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday each week. Read more

December 2016

Join musicologist and klezmer music pioneer, Walter Zev Feldman, for a fascinating talk based on his new book, Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory.

Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory (Oxford University Press 2016) is the first comprehensive study of the musical structure and social history of klezmer music, the music of the Jewish musicians' guild of Eastern Europe. Emerging in 16th-century Prague, the klezmer (Jewish musician) became a central cultural feature of the largest transnational Jewish community of modern times - the Ashkenazim of Eastern Europe. Much of the musical and choreographic history of the Ashkenazim is embedded in the klezmer repertoire, which functioned as a kind of non-verbal communal memory.

Contemporary Israel's model of large-scale heterogeneous Jewish migration followed by complex processes of absorption and integration is not unique in Jewish history. To some extent the long-term experience of Jewish communities in Italy anticipated it and provided some yardsticks for comparisons. Of course the quantitative scale of migrations and population size was different, and while Jews in Italy were a tiny minority of total society, Jews in Israel formed a significant majority of the total population.

Never before the creation of the State of Israel did Jews of so many origins live together, and in such a stimulating environment, as they did in the land they soon started calling in Hebrew i-tal-yah, an “Island of Divine Dew”.